Highlighted Quotes
- Location 113: human beings share stories to remind each other of who they are and how they should act.
- Location 116: unlikely heroes (think Dorothy, Frodo, or Rosa Parks) lured into a dangerous quest of self-discovery. Hearing these stories excites and entertains us on a conscious level but also subtly influences our very conception of what is possible in our real lives, because each of us is a hero in our own personal myth.
- Location 130: one thing: people reaching for their highest potential and struggling to create a better world.
- Location 234: broadcast model is now dramatically withering into oblivion.
- Location 236: the oral tradition that dominated human experience for all but the last few hundred years is returning with a vengeance.
- Location 274: In the natural world, memes, or ideas, must ensure their survival by exciting listeners to keep passing them along, carrying the same core message in a chain of transmission.
- Location 300: Stories rule the entangled bank of the oral tradition and great stories, well told, will rule the wilds of the media marketplace now emerging.
- Location 309: Ideas today are never fixed: a worldview is just a collection of stories about how things have come to be the way they are and what we should do about them.
- Location 346: constructed for his followers a powerful model of how the world works.
- Location 365: "I don't think you can make an impact in today's world without being ubiquitous."
- Location 374: stop shouting the facts and speak a language normal people could understand.
- Location 376: turn her rantings into a story anyone could grasp, not in the language of statistics, but in easy-to- picture little scenes.
- Location 395: begins by staking out a clear moral of the story.
- Location 396: Good morals are simple, repeatable, and memorable.
- Location 555: what audiences really want is to see their own reality and values reflected in a message,
- Location 601: Start with your audiences and their needs, then introduce yourself as a catalyst for helping them meet those needs, and a story instantly begins to unfold: Multiple characters and, most importantly, your audiences in a starring role. Conflict between your audience's desires and their current state. And a plot or journey that you invite them to join you on to reach those desires.
- Location 621: Experts don't deserve our trust.
- Location 626: experts are often the biggest liars or fools among us. The more powerful we believe our facts to be, the less we remember to make an emotional connection, or any connection at all, with our audiences.
- Location 680: humans have more in common with each other than the pseudo-science of demographic slicing has led us to believe.
- Location 682: Universality is the opposite of insincerity.
- Location 721: do-expose our humanity and talk to audiences as if we were offering them a pleasing tale in our own unique voice, not a commandment to do our bidding.
- Location 739: Humor is a universal human emotion and one that brings people instantly together.
- Location 746: the question we need to ask even of the passing successes is, "Are they funny because they're true?"
- Location 787: "Creative rebels are the most powerful force in the world."
- Location 815: The Simple Story Test
- Location 832: Does your communication make you feel something rather than just think something?
- Location 903: What we value and what we do not are codified and shared in our myths and this makes them enormously powerful-and necessary.
- Location 987: societies without myth might easily fall apart. And a world full of such mythless men is a dangerous place. stories about how to mature are the myths we rely on to face the difficulties of life, especially in changing and challenging times.
- Location 1387: Tell a story that will create anxiety then introduce the magic solution. These are the two steps of all inadequacy-based campaigns,
- Location 1450: when our fears are effectively stimulated and we have no powerful, positive myths to instruct us otherwise, we have little choice but to respond.
- Location 1493: The Dow Jones, itself tied in the long term to the rise and fall of the gross national product, gives us a beautiful simplification of all the millions of factors that went into
- Location 1522: causal relationship between exposure to television advertising and the holding of extrinsic values.
- Location 1608: Be interesting. Tell the truth. And if you can't tell the truth, change what you're doing so you can. In other words, live the truth.
- Location 1654: good stories are structured just like baseballs.
- Location 1807: creative nonconformists will rule the world. And at its core, we find the values of self-realization and creativity.
- Location 1811: inspired citizens make better brand evangelists than helpless consumers.
- Location 1855: easier to reveal inauthenticity in the online world,"form a relationship with your customers based on shared values, that is the strongest possible bond you can form,"
- Location 2092: finding shared values means you have to have some values, they can't just be milquetoast, namby- pamby middle-of-the-road crap. You need to stand for something,
- Location 2120: The Values You Want to Live
- Location 2235: our brand is not the hero, our audience members are.
- Location 2244: needs-the desire to break free from soul-crushing work, to express ourselves more fully, or to stand up for what we believe in.
- Location 2403: our greatest enemies may seem to be others who oppose us, but the real opposition comes from the fears and weaknesses within.
- Location 2723: They are the unspoken central message that can be observed through a long-term body of consistent communication.
- Location 3003: Packs or tribes that cooperate with each other are more likely to survive
- Location 3539: the effectiveness of bland, unspecific appeals to customer virtue is losing currency.
- Location 3545: "If there's any deficit we have right now, it's for meaning,"
- Location 3546: a way to reconstruct the social bonds that have been broken, it can create an ecosystem that gives people a sense of belonging to something larger." Perfect alignment of your organization's values and actions may be a destination you will never fully attain,
- Location 3555: the hero's journey always begins in an imperfect world with an unlikely hero.
- Location 3567: Documenting the ways in which your brand has become a vehicle to promote higher-level values makes your story believable and engaging.
- Location 3581: success depends on the constant collection and telling of these authentic stories of progress toward the goal of values deeply lived.
- Location 3625: we have the means to design the future we want; what's most needed are the stories that will engage millions of people to want to get there.